Another thousand words

091 Transmission retored to its rightful place. CV joints were cleaned and repacked, and I took about two
pounds of sludge off of them. No, it is not necessary for me to buff the outside of the CVs with a polishing
rag and jeweler's rouge. But I did make sure they were utterly clean, and having inspected the boots,
I'm content that they've got a lot of life left in them.

I've been stampeded enough lately that, even when I have taken the opportunity to stop and take pictures of the work I'm doing, while I do it, the copy doesn't get written to go with it. So the pictures languish and so does this blog.
So this is my second 'catch up.' There was a three week delay between the time I got the transmission back in place, and the time this got written, and most of it was dealing with sick kids, broken dryers, postponed day trips and crushing work hours. So here's the work 'to date.'

With the shifter and transmission back in place, it was time to move on to the next item to be buttoned up: the fuel tank. (Can't put the engine back in with the fuel tank out.)

So the replacement tank, which had light rust inside, was scoured with a slurry of water and roofing nails to knock the rust scale off. With that removed, I placed an order for POR15 PrepNReady and US General Tank Sealer.

Because there are so many steps in the tank work, I pushed ahead right away, knowing that something would slow me down. I was right. The dryer died.

The interior of the replacement fuel tank. Not dirty, just rusty. This is after the nails had been through to
remove the scale across the bottom. So this was my starting place.

I gave the tank an overnight with a gallon of 'Safer Muriatic Acid.' 'Safer' my tired feet. It barely touched it. I went back to Lowes and got a gallon of the full-on rotgut stuff used to kill algae in pools (dilution 10,000:1.) This stuff vaporized alarmingly when I took the lid off, like a King Cobra raising its hood. At a dilution of 13:1, it rapidly chewed its way through the rust.

Just the fumes that escaped from the cover I put over the sender hole chewed the paint off of the exterior of
the tank. And there was also the matter of the moderate amount of surface corrosion on the tank, too.

I ordered all new fuel line while the tank cooked in the back yard. I recommend Gates Barricade, so that you don't have to replace your fuel lines every year from running E10 fuel.

After a mere 4 hours, the tank was considerably improved. Now quickly, rinse that stuff out and neutralize it!

Of course, as soon as you get water all over the inside, you're going to flash rust like crazy! So after a through rinse, move quickly on to the next step: Zinc-Phosphate!

The tank evaporating out after the zinc-phosphate has been added. Note that the area that the
acid had taken off and then flash rusted is "bare" metal. Not really. There is a thin layer of
zinc-oxide that is keeping the O2 from getting to it and causing it to rust again. The whole
interior of the tank is protected like this now. But zinc-oxide won't endure fuel or water, so the final
layer has to go on: an epoxy based sealer.

To get the tank bone dry, it went on top of my kerosene heater for three hours.

The interior of the tank, sealed from the fuel for
 the first time ever. Of course, the exterior still needs help.

Tank in primer.

Having gotten the tank all Bristol style on the inside, I went to work on the outside: two coats of rust catalyzing primer to get at the slight corrosion, then two coats of flat black.

The final product, left in the garage for the epoxy in the tank to harden over the forthcoming week.

There is still a brace of work to do on the fuel tank compartment, including replacing seals,etc for the filler, evap lines, etc. I'll work those this week while the tank sealer hardens. Maybe have the whole 'firewall forward' area buttoned up by Sunday?

For those who don't Get It (TM)

About a year ago, I bought a bus.

My pastor looked at me like I was nuts. "Why a bus?" he said quizzically. He's a good joe, a smart man, an excellent father, and an engaging speaker. He doesn't get it.

My family doesn't get it. If you need a truck, buy a truck. Why an old hippie-wagen? Who wants to be seen in that?

My wife tolerates it. It doesn't threaten her station as my wife and lover. The bus does not compete for her affections nor does it threaten my willingness to go to a pressure-cooker job every day to support our family. But it does take me away from the living room in the evenings, and occasionally sends me to bed smelling like a refinery. There really isn't any 'charm' of the vehicle that tugs at her. That's because she see a car as an appliance: Who gets lathered up over the beauty of a refrigerator? Especially an OLD refrigerator?

This is not about any of these people, who are all wonderful people, whether they 'get it' or not.

This is about a universe of mis-assumptions, both positive and negative, about owning an iconic vehicle and the remarkable amounts of prejudice that owners of iconic vehicles put up with, both from other potential owners, and from those who don't 'get it.' If you don't understand why someone would want a vintage vehicle, some answers are below. If you are someone who says, "Oh, I wish I had one!" read this. (The list addresses all vintage vehicles, and VW's specifically. All are applicable to anyone with an itch to own a 'cool old car.')

Here's a Letterman list of assumptions that must be beaten out of the 'vintage vehicle enthusiast':


1. Get A Clue: The ‘60s are over. So are the ‘50s, ‘70s, ‘80s (thank God), ‘90s, in fact the entire 20th century. Any vintage parts, procedures, prices, or promises from those decades are historical artifacts today and need to be constantly reviewed and revised as vintage vehicles age and the supply of crucial parts dwindle to a halt.

2. A Repair Manual for the Compleat Idiot by John Muir is a HISTORY book: If you want to understand the state of the art at the time your vintage car was built, its a great book. Muir was a beautiful person and his love of vintage vehicles was unsurpassed. But he wasn't Jesus, and his book has not aged well because (surprise!) many of the techniques and materials he discusses and made use of were forty years out of date when he first wrote the book. His book was chiefly to encourage the average owner of the late 1960s that the they were capable of taking care of their own car, and didn't need too be rooked by the dealership to 'Keep their Ride Alive.' In that last sense, his book is a good read because it is inspirational, not because it is accurate.

3. VW Buses Aren’t For Hippies (and never were): I used to take offense to the Bus / Hippie association  when I first bought a bus in 1992. I assumed the ragging was just from John-Bircher toad-stools who still needed to bash a hippie now and then to prove their bona fides. Personally, I fell in love with Volkswagens as a breed because their design was implicitly 'owner-operator-mechanic' and that anyone who had the sense to screw in a lightbulb could keep one of these cars on the road. They were eminently practical and that fueled interest from tradesmen, families, and even the iconoclastic anti-authoritarian (some of which some were 'hippies.') In the 21st Century, nobody remembers that by 1973, every third family in the USA owned a Volkswagen, or that VW weren't hippie cars, they were 'everyone's car.' A parking lot full of VW Buses or Beetles wasn't an Earth Day rally, it was just the parking lot of your supermarket. In all of the research I've been able to do, a VW Bus is associated with the hippie culture based on one anonymous picture from Woodstock. Who says stereotypes aren't alive and well? But that's what stuck. The irony is that a sluggard's ethic is wholly unsuited to vehicles that require more maintenance, not less, than other vehicles of its time. (The maintenance is not hard, but CANNOT be neglected.)

What this means today is that VW Buses are especially ill-suited for 16-20 year old scrofulous lot wookies who "Wanna Phollow Phish like all the O.G. DedHeadz usedta roll back in da Day.”

???

(Where did all this “gangsta-rasta-hippie” nonsense come from, anyway? Again, I digress, and again, see Reality #1, especially if you fit the above description. If you don't own shop clothes or have a fairly stiff work ethic, don't buy a vintage car. ANY vintage car.)

4. Parts will never be cheaper than they are NOW: 35 years after the last Bus left Hanover, there is not going to be a miraculous resurgence of aftermarket parts. The fleet shrinks, the market contracts, less demand, less supply. Get over it. No one made a cent doing 'one off' parts runs. If you think parts quality is bad now...Stay tuned.

5. If you want ANY vintage vehicle, you'd better be buying it with three things in mind:

      a) Insurance. No one is going to insure it for as much as you think it is worth. If it is that valuable, you probably shouldn't be commuting to work in it unless your are extremely reckless or obscenely wealthy.

      b) Maintenance and Repair. You're it, buddy. You may think you can take it to a shop and they will know what to do. They won't. You do not have a vehicle that is in their book. Your car is 'special needs' and they don't do that kind of work. (Or worse, they will work on it without knowing what they're doing, and use your car to practice on.) You had better be able to do all, or almost all of your own work yourself. Or don't get into the hobby in the first place. This doesn't mean you MUST know how to do it all before you start. It just means you'd better be willing and unafraid to LEARN.

      c) No matter how new your old car is, you will always be safer in a modern car. That's because, at least here in the states, there is nothing besides Horse Power that is more important than safety. (This also carries with it a bucket load of emissions issues that are beyond the scope of this blog.) Most vintage vehicles didn't even come with seat belts for heaven's sake! So if mummy and daddy say no to the cute little MGB you've always wanted, its because they don't want to have to identify you from dental records when a GMC Yukon Denali gets you stuck in its tire tread. (Fwop,fwop,fwop,fwop,fwop,fwop....)

      d) If you are buying any vintage vehicle to improve your image, to look cool, or show what a wild-and-crazy party in your pants you are, spend the money somewhere else. Like Therapy. 

6. A vintage vehicle is like a Rick James 'Superfreak'; a narcissistic home-wrecking tramp that is high maintenance, with expensive tastes, celebrated for tantrum throwing, impossible to please and will make you look like a jackass in front of your friends, rather than like the super-hipster you were hoping for. Be willing to embrace the Shrew if you really want to drive something out of the ordinary. That's because ordinary people won't put up with this kind of drama out of their C-A-R. (This is because ordinary people think of their car the same way they think of a washing machine, e.g. as an appliance.)

7. No matter how much money you spent to buy it, the cost of upkeep will far exceed the cost of purchase.

8. This is an expensive hobby, yet it is often populated by dabblers and corner-cutters, convinced that there is a cheap way to do everything that is 'just as good' either by themselves or with inferior materials. Sometimes there is. When the vintage vehicle community finds the 'better ways' they share them. Still, cheaper parts usually equal 'inferior parts.' Cheaper labor usually means they substitute a bigger hammer for the deft touch of the right tool. This is reality. 

9. Mis-information is rife. If you take the advice of every dope on an internet forum, you'll be left chasing your tail, ruining parts, tools, or the vehicle itself. Just like every source of information, its often wise to test it first before you put everything on the line to use it on your irreplaceable whatsit. In most internet forums, there are usually old hands who have offered advice that has worked because they actually have the experience to back it, and are generous enough to share it. Those are the people worth knowing.

10. Because of the high population of cheap dreamers, restoration of a vintage vehicle is rife with con artists, scams, ripoffs, and outright theft. Automotive Body repair is by far the most frequently sued small business in the United States, not because they all do lousy work, but because the work is so expensive (it is VERY labor intensive) that you can't tell if you've gotten a really good deal on a paint job, or one of the employees is about to skip town with your down payment. Or something in-between. I've paid for four paint jobs in my life, and been dis-satisfied with all but one of them. (No it wasn't the most expensive one. That boob left HAIR in the clear-coat and was out of business a week after I collected my car.) A cheap dreamer is a sucker. Don't be the sucker.

Does this put you off owning a vintage car? Good. Does this explain why some people love it? Let me switch polarities for a moment and give you a reverse list:

1. Prior to the introduction of digital engine management systems (which have a million sensors, mostly to keep your car from too many emissions) even Fuel Injected Vehicles could be diagnosed by the owner with a $15 multi-meter and a test lamp. An earlier engine mixed the fuel and air for burning in a miniature toilet bowl called a carburetor. This was adjusted with a screwdriver, often by ear. This is as different an experience to working on a modern car, as a Model T Ford was to someone working on a *horse.* We'll see this theme come around again and again. It was a more visceral experience, with no factory stops or safety nets to keep you from doing something really damaging.

2. Most vintage car enthusiasts are not trying to drag their vehicle into the 21st Century by adding components that weren't there originally. (The poor VW Beetle seems to be the hacked upon exception.) They're in it for the experience of driving a vehicle that was built in a different era with different performance assumptions, whether that is open body racers or luxury vehicles.

3. There is a second class of enthusiast: The Historian, or show car nut. Whether working a car in stock form or customized, they are chiefly about the artistry of the vehicle, either as expressions of individualism (custom vehicles) or as restoration work that allows what they believe is the most beautiful attributes of the original vehicle to come out. (If you don't believe in vehicle beauty, look at a Pontiac Aztek, a Ford Edsel and then a Jaguar E-Type and a Corvette StingRay. The design can be breath-takingly bad...or beautiful.)

The hang up for this type of vintage vehicle nut is that their work of art is a .... work of art. Not to drive. Just polish it with a diaper. On the show circuit, these are called 'Trailer Queens.' This is like owning a Gutenberg Bible and never taking it out of the display case to, perhaps, read it.

4. To experience this kind of 'alternate automotive lifestyle,' owners will either spend fantastic amounts of money having others perform much of the work, or spend fantastic amounts of their own time and money making an objet d'art that they want to use. This is the same level of self-satisfaction that an Audiophile gets out of building his own speakers, or a model airplane nut gets out of flying a plane that he built himself from a box of balsa wood.

5. If you've ever ridden a bicycle extensively, you know that, at some level, the contraption begins to feel like an extension of your body. You animise it, giving it attributes of self awareness and personality. When a component begins to act differently than it did before, it draws instant notice because you experience the feedback very directly with your proprioceptive nervous system because your muscles and joints are directly coupled to the steering, braking, drive, suspension, etc.

This is one of the appeals of many vintage cars: 'direct drive.' The mechanisms of manipulating steering, braking, drive and suspension are more like a bicycle than a modern car. You are much less insulated from the road, and from a visceral awareness of what your vehicle is doing. I think this explains the long appeal of stick shift rather than automatic for many vintage cars: you're much more involved in the driving process.

6. I'm going to keep 'riding the bicycle' analogy: If you want to putter down the beach, a Beach Cruiser bike is your choice. If you want to fly through the air and try not to land on your face, a BMX bike is your ride. If you wish to ride across the country, the previous two bike designs would kill the rider, but a Touring bike would be just the ticket.

Today we have many different types of crossover vehicles, yet they all have many similarities: the cupholders, the power-everything, the airbags. Vintage vehicles represent a different developmental period for cars where designs were much less standardized than today. The degree of specialization today is drab compared to cars earlier in their evolution. Today, manufacturers chase MPG, Hybrid, Safety Stars, and lowest wind resistance. (Ever wonder why all of the cars are starting to look the same? That's why: physics dictates a certain look to acquire a lower wind resistance.)

The uniqueness of earlier vehicles, and the branching of their technological evolution is endlessly fascinating.

7. 'Car guys' despite how they've been sold in the media as a single thought block, are a odd lot. They aren't all interested in horsepower, and they aren't all ill-mannered oafs working on hunks of rust on cinder blocks in their drive-way. The personality type, education level, and income all vary WILDLY. Some enthusiasts are drivers. Some are builders. Some are researchers. All of them are willing to do the other things that they are NOT to be able to do the thing that they really want to do. How's that for a mixed bag?

A thousand words

That's what they say a picture is worth. I figured I'd post some notables that I haven't had corresponding copy for, but really show progress or at least items of interest. This is the trans, before and after 150*F hot water @ 1200PSI. I barely had to use soap.

BEFORE: An enormous amount of road grime, caked on, this trans has never been cleaned. Ever.

AFTER: The pressure washer was quite convincing. I'm going to recoat with a preservative to keep
the aluminum body from corroding, but it is just a light coat. In the mean time, the trans
is now ready to go back in, since the necessary work on the shifter linkage is done.

A brief digression on upholstery

Upholstery does not sound sexy. But anyone who has ever had to deal with mouse pee soaked into seat cushions discovers quickly that while it is not sexy, an upholsterer grasps geometries in ways that is beyond the ken of mere mortals.

Good quality is tough to come by. In the VW community, that is doubly true at any price. Sewfine of Denver, Colorado (previously of Amarillo, Texas) is considered to be the best mail-order upholsterer in the VW business, and their products are highly reputed. For discussion sake, I decided to price out the cost of replacing all of my seating upholstery (which is beyond salvation from the mouse pee) with product from Sewfine and a few other vendors.

My needs are pretty straightforward: I only need the seat bottom upholstery and a new set of covers, but my wife has insisted that we have fabric for the seats and vinyl for the trim; she's tired of scalding the skin off the back of her legs on a hot day.

Sewfine offered me many tiers, but also offer a range that includes the least expensive options I could do by direct order. I do nothing but strip the old material off, wash down the frames and put the new material on. No cutting, no measuring and no thinking involved. This is to do two front buckets, the 3/4 middle bench and the full rear bench, plus four headrests.

Sewfine (excluding tax and shipping)

Color	Buckets	Middle Bench	Rear Bench	Headrest x4	Bottom Pads	Cost
2	$300	$130	$130	$160	$172	$892

At this point my jaw is flopping around on the floor. Especially the price for two bucket seats!

I have used TMI before to restore my Beetle, so I thought to compare there.
 TMI (excluding tax and shipping) Note: Padding is only sold as a complete set.

Color	Buckets	Middle Bench	Rear Bench	Headrest x4	Bottom Pads	Cost
2	$326	$342	$369	$236	$521	$1794

Apparently TMI prices have gone UP a bit. Like, 12x in the last decade. I paid $350 in 1999 to do the whole car, pads and covers. And what's with $521 for FOAM?!?

I decided to make a last gasp effort at West Coast Metric who used to carry their own brand. Apparently, they still do, but only in vinyl, but I threw this one in for comparison.
 WCM (excluding tax and shipping)

Color	Buckets	Middle Bench	Rear Bench	Headrest x4	Bottom Pads	Cost
1 Vinyl	$158	$202	$165	$184	$235	$944

So it seems that I've been out of touch with the upholstery gig in VW circles for too long. (Or I've just never done a bus, which is true.) So how does custom built two tone fabric and vinyl from Sewfine come in UNDER the price of mass production stock vinyl from TMI or WCM? There may be a 'third way' however.

I met Jason of Vinyl Creations at the Maple Grove, PA show last June. He was out there hawking his skills as an upholsterer, and I grabbed one of his flyers. Turned out he and I shared a mutual acquaintance, and I decided to stash his flyer for when I was ready to do the seats. Circumstances conspired against me. I lost the darned flyer. That is, I did until just this week. My wife was disposing of a bunch of paper that had come out of the back of one of our cars and she knows to bring anything automotive related to my attention. I seized on that flyer and phone number of paper like a presidential pardon. Yes, Jason was still in the business. Yes he's available to do the seats. We swatted it back and forth over email, and he brought up the subject I didn't want to think about: what condition are the springs in? There can't be any rust. Rust? Springs? I hadn't even thought to go there. I'm trying to get gas tank, engine, and trans back in....seat springs? So now I'm off to strip the seats and see what the condition is. This means that I can't drive the vehicle without completing this stage as well.

Who knew a simple set of seats could be so complicated?

On the lubrication of rods and tubes

This is not an advertisement for personal lubrication, though I suppose that someone interested in that category could learn a lot from some of these posts. This is about lubricating parts that are critical to your shifting performance, and are a read headache to gain access to. As in, take both the engine and transmission out to get to.

Your rear shift rod is suspended inside the shift tube by, depending on year, either two or three bushings that clip onto the rod, and hold the rod suspended in the center of the tube. All of the weight of the shift rod is borne by these springy bushings that look like badminton shuttlecocks. This means that the rod never actually touches this inside of the shift tube, a concept that took me a little while to wrap my head around.

That means that the only portions of the shift rod that need to be lubricated are JUST the bushings. Not the rod itself, and not the tube. Just the bushings. If you are replacing these bushings, be aware that the reproduction units are not a good fit, and will likely require trimming of the pegs that latch into the shift rod and hold the bushing in place.

The more overlooked item is the tube itself. Here's the relevant diagram:

Front shift rod in place with new bushing and
lubrication, awaiting installation of shifter
from above.

You'll see that the shift rod is actually two parts: a front section (#10) and the rear section (#12-#14.) The front section is protected by the steel pan that protects all of the mechanisms under the floor of the cab. The rear shift rod is protected by a tube (not shown) and the front and rear ends of the tube are sealed with a boot (#14, on each end) that allows the rod to move the 3 inches or so of throw through the tube without letting grit in.

Unfortunately, the front boot failed. So any bit of grit, dirt, salt, water, or road goo that happened to hit the boot wound up inside the tube, there to get trapped in the bushing lubricant and start grinding the inside of the tube and the bushing into a tarry, crunchy sludge. The same for the socketed part of the front shift rod (#10 that looks like the resonator on a kazoo. (Or the bowl of a hash pipe; pick your own analogy.) The shifter ball (#3) goes down in here and seems to attract the worst road grit imaginable.

Why a syringe? Because when you're delivering
this goop only to specific fittings, its best
to have some control over getting it there.

So everything had to come out. #14 requires engine and transmission removed to be removed. #10 does not. I cleaned compulsively with degreaser, but some of this was no longer grease--it had almost turned to clay. Much scraping, even with a pick ensued. Then the whole of both rods were liberally degreased again and many shop towels permanently wrecked. When the rods were as clean as can be expected short of heaven, I coated them in a light anticorrosive, snapped the bushings back into place, and then added
Coastal Premium Hi-Temp Grease into each of the bushings of the rear tube with a syringe. (Why a syringe? Because these bushings were now cleaner than they had been in 37 years when they were first installed. And I wanted to keep them that way, especially by keeping the grease tucked inside and just around the bushing and not giving the whole thing a bath when all it needed was a grease job.)

There was another source of contaminant though: Inside the shift rod TUBE itself. All of the grit and goo still stuck in there...yeck. The tube is a steel pipe about 1 inch in diameter. I sprayed Oil Eater brand cleaner up inside the tube, then used a five foot length of 3/4" PVC pipe as a ramrod to cram wadded paper towel down the tube. After half a dozen passes, the paper towel stopped coming out of the front of the pipe looking like it had been dragged through a sewer. Time to pull out the big guns: Brake cleaner.

A thoroughly cleaned original bushing being re-installed on the shift rod.
Note that the lithium impregnated lube is only on the shift rod itself.
The body of the rod has been sprayed with an anti-corrosive.

Brake Cleaner is great for stuff like this, because it cuts through grease like you wouldn't believe when it is wet. But it flashes off (evaporates) so fast that it doesn't have time to do damage to raw steel. You also don't want to inhale this stuff, either. Well ventilated. I filled the tube with a liberal dose, and then performed my ramrod procedure with clean towels. I got an extra level of clean from the Brake Cleaner, and now the tube was as clean as it could get.

The bright flecks of gloss you see are not the wavy surface of the grease
reflecting the flash. They are the tiny, tiny bits of grit, sand, dirt, and
assorted contaminates reflecting the flash! The whole assembly got a
heavy duty degreasing and will get lubed with the same
grease the rest of the linkage is wearing. 

I stuffed the shift rod back into the tube, taking off the grit covers (plastic sandwich bags) as I went. Finally, the shift rod was well seated. back in the tube, I put on the new boot at the front, went to put on the rear one....and was stymied. Believe it or not, the assemblers apparently expected you to snap each of these bushings into place and lube them WHILE you were loading the rod. Because there is no other way that the rear boot can be installed without splitting it. Which quite negates the purpose of having a seal that permits the rod to move in and out of a set of bellows to work the transmission. I'll review this later, but I'll need to find some other solution. That rear shift rod is not coming back out.

The front rod (And the shifter ball #3, and the reverse lockout spring #5 was filthy, gritty, etc. Frankly, I'm amazed that the thing shifted at all. Then I discovered that there was a part missing and just about fell into hysterics under the bus.

Cleaner!

Part #15 in the diagram at the top of this page is a bushing which holds the front the shift rod inside a it and keeps it stable. This bushing was a remarkably tough nut to get into the receiving hole: I eventually put it in boiling water for 5 minutes to soften it, and even then my fingertips came away bruised. The bushing has an internal groove to store lubrication so after finally getting it mounted, I lubed up the front end of the 'hash pipe' and slid it in, neat as you please. Just like they wuz made for each other.

So now the real fun begins. With the shift mechanisms, bushings and other consumables all sorted, the transmission can go back in, the CV joints cleaned and repacked (I'm told that this is like wrestling a sow) and then the inboard CVs reconnected to the transmission. Finally, reconnect clutch cable to throw out arm. Then spend an hour adjusting the shift gate until all five gears (1-4 + R) happily click right into position.

Why did this take so long? Blame the rain, snow, cold, and my job, all of which conspire to keep me away from these simple, not actually very time consuming tasks!

Too Much of a Good Thing

Sometimes, you can be too aggressive in your attempts to get a leg up on a problem. Examples of this may include bringing a fire hose when only a eyedropper is required, or deciding to use oven cleaner rather than simple green, just because you're in a hurry. As many mistakes are made from over application of effort as under-application.

My bus is up on six ton, 21 inch lift jack stands, which puts the bottom of the vehicle about half a meter off of the ground. This is fantastic, because when you're lying on a mechanic's creeper, it allows you to work with your arms fully extended, which really reduces the fatigue.

Unfortunately, I ran on to a problem with it came time to pull the engine: 

Skids of the ATV lift used to remove the engine are only a 15" lift. The bus is too high off of the ground
for the lift to reach the engine.

So now I'm faced with two options: lower the bus, or raise the lift. I decided not to lower the bus. Some judicious use of 2x4 lumber on the skids raised a surface enough to permit removing the engine.

THAT is one tight fit. Since the lift pivots forward to lower the load, the load moves both down and forward, just at the time when you really don't have much wiggle room front to back. There are so many engine accessories that must be removed just to get the engine to the point of having a bare 12-15mm of space front to rear within the engine bay. So it is almost a wiggling motion: pull to the back, drop the hack half an inch, pull to the back, drop, back, drop, back, drop. Over and over.

The sticking point; the engine is as far back in the bay as it will go, but the bottom studs have not cleared
from where they pass through the transmission housing.

Well, I bent up the end of the oil filler to straighten the engine out enough to get the bottom studs out. But I had to grab the exhaust and lift steadily to change the angle of the engine so that these bottom studs would disengage without bending. Better the oil filler banged up (bolt on replacement) than the studs. (Not so bolt on.)

The input shaft from the transmission has
cleared the clutch disk, but those studs at the
bottom are still not quite free.

I've pulled a few engines in my time, all VW aircooled. My first was a 1600cc TypeI single port from a 1968 Karmann Ghia in 1991, and I've pulled (and installed) six or seven more in the intervening time including a 1971 Bus engine in a parking lot with only a cheap jack and some 2x4s liberated from a nearby dumpster. The Bus engine I did in six hours working by myself from the time the engine was delivered to the parking lot, and drove it to work the next day.

So I would not consider myself inexperienced. Perhaps a dilettante, but not without having run the gauntlet a few times. Perhaps I was more haphazard in my youth and that lead to better work times (and more parts left over.) That 1971 Bus was the all time worst, since I had never experienced fiddling with a rear engine carrier bar before, and didn't really have either the muscle or equipment to do right by it. So I had to invent levers out of those liberated 2x4s to make the engine tip in the directions I needed it to so that all of the fittings would line up.

Engine on the ground, fully disengaged.

So while I won't credit this engine pull as the worst, having the body too high off of the ground and a less than practiced eye for this model and design, I had some "sweat, swear, and try again" moments. But all being equal, it was one hour from beginning the pull to the time that the engine was on the floor and no longer properly part of the vehicle. I hauled it around to the edge of the vehicle, photographed it a dozen different ways for documentation, and then stashed it still on its jack under the workbench so that I would have more swing space to work in the rest of the garage. There is still the fuel tank and the transmission to remove before I get to start putting things back together. Whyfor? Well the engine has to come out to get the fuel tank and the trans out, the tank has to come out to be replaced, and the trans has to come out so I can install $5 of rubber and plastic bushings that have given up the ghost and caused the shifting to feel like a garbage truck, with Ouija board vagueness in gear locations, making the search for second gear more of an epic than it should be.

Progress!

The Horror of a Busted Stud

There is nothing worse than a busted stud. Just ask any heifer.

When the going gets tough, the tough use propane. Really. There is little substitution (when you're not concerned about scorched paint or smoke rolling off of components, oils vaporizing, etc.) for the judicious application of heat when you want to get a fastener's attention.

In this case there are a dozen or so fasteners that need their attitude corrected. They're the Phillips head screws that attach the mantling at the rear of the engine. Because you must pull the engine straight back to disengage it from the transmission, these characters have to come out. They don't want to come out, and all the PB Blaster in the world hasn't convinced them. It's time to bring in my little friend, the propane torch.

I lit up the propane bottle I use for pipe sweating in plumbing applications, dial down the flame to about an inch, and then, having made sure that all pieces of flammable foam, rubber, or other materials are not near where the flame wants to work, I started by playing the flame in a constantly moving circle for a count of 30 around the bolt head. Not on the bolt head, mind you; around. The idea is to cause the metal around the bolt to expand more than the bolt does, making the captive nut that the bolt is screwed into larger as the metal expands. Then I shut off the torch and quickly grabbed my P2 Phillips screwdriver. (Phillips comes in different sizes, and each size is good for a specific torque. If you mismatch the size of the driver to the size of the head, expect to strip the head, or not be able to generate much torque.)

One hand pulling down hard to keep the driver from 'camming out' of the bolt head. The other twisting counter-clockwise as hard as I could manage.

TINK!

The bolt is loose and backs out smoothly. I won't bore you with repeated details: I performed this eleven more times, and all of the rear mantling was out. No cammed-out stripped bolt heads, no bolt heads twisted off. Yea, me.

Flushed with my new success, I decided to attack the exhaust manifold studs. These are legendary for snapping off, stripping off, or the bolts seizing solid. Probably because the engine was designed in the mid  1960s as a 1700cc, 80 DIN HP (8.2:1 CR) for the  VW 411/412 mid-size sedan series (weighing 2468 lbs.) before being adapted into the Porsche 914 and the VW Bus in 1972. By the time my 3042 lb. 1977 Bus toddled into view, the same engine had bore and stroke increased to produce 2000cc displacement, but owing to a lower compression ratio (7.3:1), and increasingly strangling emissions regulations, power output has actually fallen to 68 DIN HP. Torque produced between the original design and the final incarnation was the same, just moved lower in the power curve to help the heavier bus lumber its way up to speed.

I go into all of these eye-chart specifications because it shows how crazy things were at the time in automotive engineering. One of the byproducts of this increase in displacement, combined with lowering of compression ratio, was that exhaust temperatures skyrocketed. For the emissions, this is great. You're going to more completely burn up your fuel and spit fewer horrors out the tailpipe if you've put them through an aggressively hot engine and then designed the exhaust system to keep the temperature up in a long path to the tailpipe.

Unfortunately, one of the other things you burn up in this increased inferno are your exhaust valve seats. The original spec of this engine wasn't built for this kind of abuse, and Volkswagen's policy of using interchangeable parts to solve problems without designing 'whole system' really chewed up engines. This includes little things, too....like exhaust manifold studs. Made of mild steel and screwed directly into tapped aluminum heads, these studs were not engineered for higher heats generated by these engines. At the very least, copper nuts should have been substituted for the equally workaday mild steel nuts that were used. No such luck. So I decided to bite the bullet and as long as I had torch in hand and success under my belt with the mantling bolts, give the hot-foot to the exhaust manifold nuts a try and see if I could get them out without snapping one off.

It was nervous work, but my score was five nuts removed with studs in place, and three nuts frozen on the studs, but the studs backed cleanly out of the aluminum heads, so new studs should be easy to turn back into those threads when coated with some very high temperature Loctite. I discovered some surprises: steel nuts had apparently been replaced at different times, since about half were 12mm and the other half were the stock 13mm. (This is no surprise: the 12mm is much easier to work with, owing to somewhat improved clearance.)

But one nut was clearly larger than 12mm, but when I put on the 13mm, it just thumped around when turning. This is where I felt that 'uh-oh' sensation grow cold in me. A nut that has been so thoroughly abused and corroded that the corners have eroded right off bolt. How are you going to grab this with a socket now?

So I got out the torch again, and this time applied it to the 12mm socket on the end of a foot long extension. I heated the socket until it was smoking hot (there goes the temper on THAT socket!) Then put it over the nut and gave it a couple of mighty whacks with a framing hammer. I felt it hit home and stop moving over the nut on the third whack. When I let go, the extension hung out the bottom of the engine like a surgical instrument left in place. I took a twenty minute break and when I came back, the socket had cooled around this nut, the heat having expanded and stretched it to become "12mm plus some" and then been beaten into place around this rounded off nut. I popped the ratchet on and heaved and it didn't pop, snap or crack. The nut was so thoroughly corroded on to the stud that the whole stud just rotated cleanly out of the head. The socket is permanently attached to it. I don't care. If I have to spend $20 for a new socket set to replace one lousy socket, it is still cheaper than coping with just one busted stud.